Chapter 132: Between the Chaos
I became aware of air before I became aware of myself.
Not sight, not sound, not the blessed realization that I hadn’t been permanently stapled to the afterlife—just air. Thick, choking, dust-laden air that clawed down my throat and filled my lungs with the kind of grit usually reserved for underpaid chimney sweeps.
I coughed. Violently. The sort of cough that rips its way up from the soles of your feet and makes you briefly reconsider whether you should just lie back down and accept death instead. Unfortunately, death was apparently on vacation, so I hacked, spat, and clawed my way forward until my fingers broke through into something looser, lighter.
And then, like the world’s most confused mole, I erupted out of the darkness.
The street greeted me—or, rather, what remained of it.
My eyes bulged as I stared around at a landscape that looked like it had been redecorated by a very angry titan with a grudge against architecture. Half-collapsed buildings leaned drunkenly against one another. Splintered beams jutted upward like ribs from a corpse.
Chunks of mountain—actual mountain, the sort of thing you usually expect to remain politely in place—were scattered across the road like dice rolled by a vengeful god.
And me?
I was fine.
Not just fine. Perfectly, bewilderingly, utterly fine.
My cloak was dusted with dirt, yes. My hair—saints forgive me—was a disaster, streaked gray with ash and rubble. But beneath that?
No blood. No broken bones. Not so much as a bruised rib despite the fact that I had, to my recollection, recently been on the losing end of an argument with a collapsing mountain.
For a moment, I just stared at my hands, turning them over in disbelief. Whole. Smooth. The skin unmarred.
"Oh, splendid," I croaked aloud, my voice half a wheeze. "I’ve either died and been reincarnated as myself again—truly the cruelest option—or someone’s played a very tasteless joke with divine intervention."
The thought didn’t have time to properly marinate before panic shouldered its way into my chest.
"Nara!" My voice cracked like a fourteen-year-old trying to impress a tavern girl. "Rodrick!"
A muffled groan answered me. Low, pained, but real.
I whipped toward the sound, my heart hammering hard enough that it nearly fell out of my throat. There—half-buried in rubble, face caked with dirt, coughing like a man halfway through a very violent baptism—was Rodrick.
"Rodrick!" My heart lurched painfully against my ribs as I scrambled forward, tearing chunks of rock and shattered wood away with the desperation of a man digging for treasure he couldn’t afford to lose.
He coughed again, his swollen face tilting toward me, and for a horrible second I thought he’d stop moving altogether. But then his hand twitched, fingers clenching faintly against the dirt, and my chest nearly split open in relief.
"Unharmed," I whispered, breathless, staring at him as though my eyes would betray me if I blinked. "You’re... unharmed. How in all the saints’ forsaken names are you unharmed?"
He groaned something incoherent in reply, which I generously chose to interpret as gratitude.
I laughed, breath hitching as disbelief twisted into something dangerously close to tears. "Oh, yes, of course. You survive mountains collapsing because you’re too stubborn to let geology win. Truly, Rodrick, you’re the stuff of ballads."
Before I could collapse entirely into hysterics, a sudden scraping noise sounded behind me.
I spun—nearly tripping over Rodrick’s half-buried body—and froze.
It was Salem. Salem, staggering through the haze with one arm plunged into the rubble as though fishing for lost cutlery. Except this time, what he hauled out wasn’t a weapon.
It was Nara.
The boy’s limp form dangled from Salem’s grasp, pulled from the earth like an unfortunate carrot uprooted by an overly aggressive farmer.
His cloak was shredded, his little dagger nowhere in sight, but he was alive. His ears twitched faintly, his mouth opening in a soft groan, and I nearly collapsed again in relief.
Trailing behind them came the Man in White. Untouched of course. He looked like he’d merely stepped out for a stroll and happened to return during an apocalypse. Not a scratch marred him, not a fleck of dust dared to settle on his pristine coat.
"Saints damn you," I muttered, more to myself than to him. "Of course you’re unharmed. Why wouldn’t you be? The laws of mortality are apparently just decorative suggestions in your presence."
I opened my mouth to ask how—because surely someone had to explain how we weren’t currently a collection of smears beneath a landslide—but the universe, generous as always, decided to interrupt me.
From across the street, the remains of a building shuddered. Then collapsed forward in a spray of splinters and smoke, revealing three very familiar silhouettes staggering from the wreckage.
The naked knight, limping dramatically, apparently convinced that a punctured lung was just a flesh wound. And beside him—Dunny, pale and trembling, clutching his wand with quivering fingers. Fitch trailed behind them both, a bewildered expression plastered to his face.
I blinked. "Oh, marvelous. The gang’s all here. Shall we form a chorus line and start singing about how indestructible we are? Because clearly that’s the theme of the evening."
The knight spat blood onto the ground through his helmet. "That... was exhilarating."
"Exhilarating?" I sputtered. "You just survived being buried under a mountain, and your first thought is exhilarating?
Gods help me, why do I keep surrounding myself with lunatics?"Dunny collapsed against the nearest wall, muttering prayers into his sleeve between shallow, gasping breaths.
I turned slowly in a circle, taking in all of them. All alive. Every last one of us.
Except—
Not entirely.
Because when my eyes slid past them, over the broken cobblestones and the gutted storefronts, I saw them. My little army, my accidental choir of pretty faces and soft voices, the boys I’d painted into my colors with ink and vanity.
They weren’t groaning, or limping, or clinging to life. They were gone. Crushed flat beneath slabs of mountain and beams of stone, their delicate features smeared away into anonymity.
Some half-buried, some twisted at impossible angles, their fine-boned wrists still clutching useless blades, their once-pretty hair matted with dust and blood.
For a moment I couldn’t breathe.
I wanted to laugh, I wanted to scream, I wanted to claw the sight from my eyes. They’d followed me with doe-eyed trust, eager to be shaped, to be claimed, to be mine. And now they were red smears beneath rubble, forgotten extras in a play where the leads refused to die.
My boots crunched over debris until I found him—one of the first, the boy whose shoulders I’d draped with my own coat at the start of the battle to act as a decoy.
The coat was intact though half-buried, its dark fabric smeared brown with blood and dirt. His hand clutched the hem, as though trying to keep it wrapped around himself even in death.
I knelt, my throat tight, my fingers working numbly to pry the stone away from his body. He didn’t move, of course. He never would again.
But when at last the coat came free, I shook it once, hard, dust flying off in clouds, and pulled it back over my shoulders. Then I turned to face the Man in White once more.
My voice broke when I finally whispered, "How?"
No one answered.
I turned sharply toward Salem, who had the decency to at least look vaguely ashamed as he tried to sit up. "You. You didn’t take cover. You stood in the middle of the street while a mountain fell on us. What in the bleeding hell possessed you?"
He coughed, spat dirt, and said nothing.
I whirled on the Man in White next. "And you. Don’t you dare give me that enigmatic smile—what did you do? What are you?! Why am I not currently flatter than a week-old pancake?"
His lips twitched, just barely, and then he looked away. No answer.
I opened my mouth to press, to scream, to demand—but then I stopped. My throat tightened, my chest ached, and I realized, with a startling clarity, that I didn’t actually want to know.
Not yet.
Not when Rodrick’s pulse still beat beneath my hand. Not when Nara whimpered faintly in Salem’s arms. Not when my lungs still burned with the taste of dust and life.
I exhaled shakily. "Fine. Fine. Don’t answer. Keep your precious little secrets. Just—saints damn it, just let me be glad we’re still breathing."
The silence that followed was punctuated only by the sound of rubble shifting beneath our boots.
Eventually, my panic receded just enough for rational thought to resume its assault on my skull. Which meant, naturally, that I remembered the two things without which I was basically a well-dressed liability.
My pen and my stopwatch.
I scrambled back toward the mound where I’d first clawed my way out, dropping to my knees and pawing through the rubble like a desperate gambler searching for one last coin.
And there. A glint of silver. The smooth, familiar weight of my stopwatch, scratched but intact. And beside it, half-buried in dust, the gleam of my pen. I clutched them both to my chest with the fervor of a starving man clutching bread.
"Don’t you ever leave me again," I muttered, stroking the pen’s shaft like an unhinged lover.
Salem, meanwhile, was doing the same, prowling the rubble until his hands closed around the hilts of his twin swords. His grin when he lifted them free was sharp enough to cut glass.
One by one, the rest gathered their weapons.
We regrouped in the shattered street, dust swirling around us, the night sky above still bruised with fire from the mountain’s collapse.
"Well," I croaked, forcing my lungs into something resembling calm. "We’re alive. Somehow. Saints only know how long that miracle will last. Any suggestions?"
Salem spat blood to the side and grinned. "We find the mage. And we kill him."
"Wonderful," I muttered. "Truly inspired strategy. Step one: be alive. Step two: undo that with reckless homicide."
The knight chuckled darkly, Dunny groaned, and I began to weigh whether leadership was even worth the ulcers. But before we could get any farther, a sound interrupted us.
Footsteps.
Heavy. Steady. Too deliberate to be falling rubble. Too slow to be fleeing survivors. I froze. My stomach plunged into my boots.
"Please tell me that’s just someone bringing us a celebratory drink," I whispered.
I turned, slowly, toward the direction of the plaza.
The barrier was gone. The shimmering wall of translucent light that had funneled us out, that had stood as the final word of the mage’s dominance—it was gone.
Dust billowed through the empty gateway, curling across the street like smoke from a funeral pyre.
And then, through the haze, he appeared.
The King-Class mage.
Empty-handed now, his obsidian blade shattered by my hand, his gauntlets smeared with dust and violet light.
But he was alive. Whole. Still walking through the chaos.
My heart seized, my mouth went dry, and for the first time since crawling free of the mountain, I truly wished I’d stayed buried.